CCP's War On Bots: Questor Tears, A Mixed Message

"Unfortunately RMT tears are a bit harder to harvest but if you can find a way feel free to share (don't link the site) and I will give you a virtual hug in my head."

- CCP Sreegs

CCP Sreegs is correct when he wrote that finding the tears of Eve Online RMTers is harder than collecting the tears of botters.  However, I found a place where I could find both RMT and botter tears intermixed: the forums for the Questor mission bot.

I went back to the beginning of the latest anti-bot, anti-RMT campaign and collected as many tears as possible.  I published the first set of tears Monday to celebrate that Questor's software developer Da Teach got busted right before Fanfest for illicit RMT.  Botting tears usually are fun but this batch is a bit depressing.  The other tears I've published are basically from players who just decide cheating is okay.  This batch includes tears from hardcore botters and RMT farmers.  To say that CCP Sreegs and Team Security have a lot of work ahead of them is a bit of an understatement.  But there are a few gems in this batch I got some laughs out of.

Enjoy!


27 February:

jakesmurf:  "Just a heads up on a potential banwave - I lost a few accounts this morning at downtime. There doesn't seem to be any particular cohesion in which ones got axed and which ones didn't. I had several bot accounts that were not banned, and two accounts that never botted at all did get banned."

persin:  "I can confirm, they are starting new ban wave. I had all my accounts that were linked to me banned for generic 2 weeks. I have not ever done RMT.  Oh, I ran questor around 18hrs a day everyday. Total of 7 out of 7 accounts temp banned."

smg:  "3 accs of total 7 were bannehamered for me today.  14 day's ban for using macro.  I have been botting for 18 - 20 hrs a day. No RMT from this accs"

Nocturn:  "6 of 6 Accounts Banned.  14 days ban for using macro.  23 Hours botting a Day.  No RMT from this Accs"

Botina:  "4 ban yesterday.  3 ban today.  15-18h per day.  perma ban all during work.  I am fucked..."

SamePerson:  "2\2 perma ban 25 Feb.  rmt and 23h per day."

28 February:

vicious666:  7 of my 84 bots got banned for 15 days + got ban on 2 non bot char who anyway where moving stuff around for the bots (such as freighter chars). 

fun part is i do rmt with 70 of them, and none of that got caught, pratically they banned me for 2 weeks half of the 14 bots i use for sustain my gameplay in eve.

i also heard some friends who got banned 1 char from total of 8 he was running from the same computer, but the other 7 are fine. so the ccp methods are meh.. random/made manually/susceptible to gm discreption /willing to indagate further/not related to the amount of time,

I know about ppl who got ban on theyr only single bot who where running max 8/H day and ppl with 15 24/24 untouched, so is hard to define a "cause"

tbh is more than a year and never got such issue, so seams now ccp have some "will" to stop questor , or is an economycs trick, 3k account banished,so in 2 weeks all 3k gonna change account-transfer/sell chars ? is a 100000$ dollar operation for them (in plex used) and they not lose a single account

Botina:  "Looks like i was ccp enemy no. 1. since i got permabans on 8 of 10 chars. Hm, what i done wrong...  Maybe just bad luck with little more dedicated GM..."

29 February:

gotteshand:  "Whats surprising about this is what was banned was not the botting accounts. All 98 are still intact nothing at all what they banned was 2 accounts where I collected the ISK in form of materials for super-capital and titan production. No rmt or anything.. Guess they wanted that isk gone badly because if API is right which it should since its still working all isk, assets etc are gone.. they just gone and wiped about 3trillion isk~ makes no sense to me with leaving the farming accounts intact wont hurt. Also talk to all the ppl I've outfitted with supers and titans in alliance no one received a ban. Bots and stuff has been up and running in not so crowed places ~5-6ppl local for 6 months now 23/7 over VPN's with 2 bots sharing 1 IP."

15 March:

Da_Teach (the Questor developer):  "Well it wouldn't be fair if I didnt post here :)  I got banned yesterday on 9 of my 10 accounts. I didn't run 24/7, max 8ish hours per day. But I doubt they got me for botting, I just did a lot of RMT :) The fact that they got my mule-char (and another char that never ran a bot in its life) pretty much proves that."

runkittyrun:  "Just got 2 week ban on 2 account, only one was running for a few hours yesterday, previous to that I ran it 20/7. The other account was the isk holding one.  Maybe CCP is doing round 2 of banning for fanfest?"

klak1212:  "3 out of 3 accounts banned for 'Macro use' for 15 days. Ran 23/7 (or as much as I could). Seemed like after the 1.5 patch, my clients were crashing constantly and then today I got banned."


26 March:

gotteshand:  "Fanfest Security presentation.. this is bad really bad..."

Edgar:  "Sky is falling.... Stop botting now...."

rixim:  "Most of this stuff is good for most of us. There are questions about the number of farmers in this community, but I suspect that those of us that do farm, are smart enough to not hold much isk or link accounts. :D"

Ganondorf:  "No Rixim i think Edgar is right, stop botting now, dismantle your farms, you (you = the farmers) got ccp's attention in the first place, they were not caring about bots at all, and now i read ban reports from players every day. Even now a guy doing only a small amount of hours of botting got banned for 30 days for botting. Also yesterday another guy got hit by the banhammer, and the day before as well another one. It's not a good time to bot."

Loller68:  "Fuck this, i was just going back in business to help sustain all my accounts.  Farmers fucked up everything, as always when money are involved it's always a mess."

2 April:

Blinker:  "Banned today for 14days; 1 never used Questor - Received the ban.  6 that used Questor also received the ban"

dawtips:  "I had 5 banned today. Running 20/5."

19 April:

The Vindicator:  "Accounts questor banned: 3.  Accounts no-questor banned: 2.  1month of ban"

Gray:  "6 bots + their logist/trader down the drain. All of them permbans for RMT (no warnings, no mail, just instaban). This set of accs has been running since 5 Dec 2011, though - which is a helluva lot of time for RMTing toons. Looks like either CCP gone lazy, or I've started to do something the right way..."